minutes, and then said, "No, it's fun," displaying every tooth in his
head as he did so as a proof that his conversational brevity was due
not to a surly disposition, but to the limitations of his vocabulary.

The pupils at Espartillar were exceedingly well treated. The house was
most comfortably furnished, and contained a full-sized English
billiard-table, two pianos, a plentiful supply of books, and a barrel-
organ, for this was many years before the birth of the gramophone. It
is the singular custom on most estancias to kill beef for six months
of the year, and mutton for the remaining six, which entails a certain
monotony of diet. We had fallen in for the beef-eating half-year, but
the French wife of the English estancia-carpenter officiated as cook,
and she had all the culinary genius of her countrywomen. Above all she
avoided those twin abominations "Ajo" and "Aji," or garlic and green
chilli, which Argentines cram into every dish, thus making them
hideously unpalatable to Northern Europeans.

In an absolutely treeless land, without any coal measures, fuel is one
of the greatest difficulties of camp life. In my time, in the city of
Buenos Ayres, all the coal came from England, and cost, delivered, 5
pounds a ton. Its cost in the country, hauled for perhaps twenty miles
over the roadless camp, would be prohibitive, and there was no wood to
be had. For this reason, on every estancia there were some ten acres
planted with peach trees. It seems horribly wasteful to cut down peach
trees for fuel, but they grow very rapidly, burn admirably, and whilst
they are standing the owner gets an unlimited supply of peaches for
pickling and preserving. The soil of the Argentine suits peaches, and
both sorts, the pink-fleshed European "free-stone" and the American
yellow-fleshed "cling-stone," do splendidly. In Spanish, the former
are called _melocotones_, the latter _duraznos_. At Espartillar there